agreed that we must send Ruth and John dozens of books to keep them occupied until we got them out – as we surely would.
It was at this point that a soft voice, vaguely familiar to me, butted in from the front row.
‘Excuse me, but that won’t work.’
The green bomber jacket struck a chord, too.
‘Why not?’ demanded our chairwoman.
‘They won’t fit in the box.’
‘Box?’
‘For the inmate’s belongings. Alright, in Whitemoor and Long Lartin, in them top-security jails, you’re also allowed a piece of carpet, what don’t fit in the box, and a budgie or a canary, and obviously the cage ain’t going to fit in the box. Books won’t fit in the box. The screws’ll chuck ’em out.’
It was Psycho. Knife Man Dan. Stuart Shorter. Wearing the same clothes as when I’d first seen him round the corner from Sainsbury’s, a year before.
‘So each inmate has a box?’ someone asked.
‘Two boxes. One in possession and one in reception. I’m not being funny, but you should know about boxes if you’re going to have a campaign.’
The most important thing we could do, he persevered, was write letters, send stamps, and not expect to get replies. Letters go missing. Depression comes.
Stuart stood as he was talking. The chairwoman demanded it, and it appeared to cause him a little trouble to find his balance. He was about five foot six, bow-legged and anaemic. His hands he kept shoved in his jacket pockets like a man on the sidelines during a cold football match. He raised his voice for a few words when people at the back called out ‘Louder!’ ‘Speak up!’ then forgot himself and lapsed back into his regular murmur. But he would not stop talking. It was as though, having tasted at last what lack of diffidence was like, he was determined not to lose a single second of the pleasure.
‘Don’t expect the visits to go well, neither. See, because visits is only two hours every two weeks, when you’re a prisoner you build yourself up to such a pitch that when the visit comes it can’t go right. It’s not –’ directing himself at John’s wife – ‘that he don’t love you, it’s just that visits is all what you live for when you’re inside.’
‘Because if most men are true,’ he observed a moment later, ‘when they go back to their cells that’s when you know the loneliness. You can’t take it. You know the loss.’
And about the stone throwing, Stuart was adamant. ‘I understand the old dear there is feeling rageous, but prison is all about having privileges and taking them away. If you break the judge’s windows it’s Ruth and John what will suffer.’
‘How can they suffer more?’ an indignant man called out. ‘They’ve taken away their freedom and their dignity, what else is left?’
‘Their wages,’ replied Stuart.
A silence.
Then a bemused female voice from the other side of the room: ‘Prisoners get wages?’
In the top drawer of Stuart’s large office desk are his legal drugs.
‘Yeah, feel free,’ he calls out from the kitchen, where he’s dumped the sarnie plates into the sink among the tea mugs and is battling with a six-pack of Stella.
I hold up a grey plastic tube. All the substances he takes appear to cause him problems.
‘Chlorpromazine. Cabbages you. It’s also called Largactil. Heard of it? No? The liquid cosh? Well, they gave it me a lot in the kids’ homes. Used to put me in a wheelchair in them days.’
‘Why do you take it at all?’ I wonder and place the tube back in his collection.
‘Nah – it’s just another anti-psychotic. The side effects are that it leaves a nasty taste in your mouth.’
Stuart reels off the names of his medications like a classics scholar. ‘Ophenidrine. A mate of mine what was looking on the Internet said he found Saddam Hussein used it for tactical military weapons. Zopiclone, what calms you; I’ve also been on drugs like Melarill, what are banned now, amitriptyline, painkiller, which gives you muscle spasms. Mad, in’it? At the minute I’m only on diazepam, which is Valium. It’s a well-known fact that alcohol and diazepam don’t mix, and they know I drink.’
‘They’ is shorthand for doctors, social workers, drug advisers and policemen, although in this case it is balanced against one doctor in particular whom he is convinced is out to ignore his interests. One of the things that intrigues me about Stuart is his categorisation of his enemies. The biggest foe is ‘the System’, the amorphous body of government-funded institutions that has chased him about like a bad rain cloud ever since he was twelve years old. All homeless people hate the System, even though many of its organisations – housing benefit, social security, the rough sleepers unit, dozens of charities – have been set up especially to make their lives easier. To Stuart these supportive bodies prove the essential duplicity of the System. What the person with a house might consider to be an admirable carrot-and-stick approach to making the homeless return to ‘mainstream’ society (the encouragement of welfare payments, back-to-work schemes, subsidised housing, backed up, for those who don’t cooperate, by the threat of the police and prison time) is looked at quite differently by Stuart. It is an approach that patronises you at one end and swipes you raw at the other. For many homeless, the reason they’ve ended up on the streets is precisely because this carrot-and-stick tactic has, in their case, got into a jumble. The government network of organisations that offers them dole cheques, a free health service and endless numbers of worried social workers, also puts them into a home with rampant paedophiles (unwittingly, maybe, but what does that signify when you’re fourteen years old with ‘a grown man’s dick down your throat’?) and then beats them up under the guise of ‘tough love’ in quasi-military youth detention centres whenever they do something wrong themselves.
The System is to Stuart a bit like the Market is to economists: unpredictable, unreliable, ruthless, operating in a haze of sanctimonious self-justification, and almost human.
The closest Stuart gets to giving the System a face is through the doctors, drug advisers, housing support officers and outreach workers with whom he deals directly. Although he is generally friendly to this little army of helpers, he respects almost none of them. When they are good, he talks about them as possible friends; when they are disappointing (which is frequently, because they are, after all, just people), they become another piece of evidence against the System.
Even one or two of the police he likes now and then.
At the moment Stuart is banging on about doctors. ‘Last Monday, my sister and me girlfriend were really worried because I’d gone doolally. Lost it. But my GP refused to even speak to them. They went up to him and said, “Look we’re really concerned about his safety. He’s got something tied round his neck, I’m not sure what it is, and he’s got knives all over the bed.” But he refused to see me. I thought that was really fucking rude!’
Recently, I asked Linda Bendall,
